Dr. Vivek Murthy

the Senate, much less that kind of politics.

And I just remember feeling like I had failed my family and my friends because I had run into this problem.

The thing about loneliness is it doesn't always make sense to someone on the outside.

But in that time of crisis, I found myself withdrawing more and more at exactly the time what I needed to do was actually to reach out more and to lean on other people.

So I remember those days were very dark.

And thank goodness for my wife, Alice, and for my mother and father, my sister, who really came together around me and lifted me up during some extraordinarily hard, hard moments, and to friends who rallied around me.

And you would think that I would have learned my lesson at that point and said, hey, okay, when you're in a crisis, you're feeling bad, reach out to other people.

But what I've realized since then is that wisdom is not something that we always retain.

It's something we have to be reminded of.

And at other points in my life, especially after my first term finished as Surgeon General, once again in this pit of loneliness and feeling like I had lost my work community, I had lost my friend community in part because I had failed to stay in touch with people during my first term and consistently had put work ahead of staying in touch with the people I loved.

which was a mistake in retrospect, but I had to deal with the consequences of that.

And I was up in Boston for something work-related, and I saw an old friend there who I hadn't seen in years.

And I just sort of confessed to her how I was feeling, like pretty lonely and isolated.

And she just said to me, your problem is not that you don't have friends.

Your problem is you're not experiencing friendship.

You have people in your life who would be there for you if you reached out to them.

If you swallowed the misgivings or worry or anxiety you have about how they might be mad at you for not staying in touch and just said, hey, I'm here.

I need you as a friend.

I'm sorry for not being there before, but I'm here.

And people will respond.